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Challenge of the Week
Alright, you brilliant beasts. To kick off the first $25 Weekly Challenge, we're keeping it easy and exact. Suuuure..... Most of us have been in this spot, asked the question, so we'll frame a setting. Here goes. You're on a first date with a person you met online. There's attraction there, but you're still trying to figure out if the chemistry is physical AND mental. The person across the table asks you what kind of writing you do, and when you give them a genre, they say, in one way or another, "Describe your writing to me." This week's challenge is to answer that question here. The winner will be decided by likes on this one.

Love Me, Tinder

“How did you know I write? It’s not something I‘ve shared.”

”It’s pretty obvious from your profile. Besides, anyone who speaks so deliberately, so articulately; who uses the vocabulary you use… that person must feel a need to write those words down for posterity, mustn’t they?” As she spoke a long, elegantly painted finger twisted itself around a hanging tendril of hair, whilst the faintest whisper of a smile haunted her otherwise stoid expression. “I simply adore a writer,” she cooed.

Stoid, that is, but for her eyes.

I sensed that we had reached a fulcrum in our conversation. That the beginnings of a salacious relationship teetered upon my reply. But was that what I really wanted from this woman I had just met? Sex? And all of the heavy lifting required afterwards?

She was obviously smart, and playfully beautiful, but mostly I was drawn into those famished eyes of hers which gazed hawkishly back into my own, and to that instinctive caution I felt; that at any moment she might slide over until she was close enough to take a bite from that tender muscle just above my collarbone, her lips and tongue massaging away the pain her teeth would inevitably cause to the fabric of my being.

Of course that is what I wanted, sex. It was why I was here, wasn’t it? But I was a middle-aged, long off the market man feeling his was through this strange, new, matriarchal world, so I selected my words carefully.

“I would hardly call myself a writer.” I spoke slowly, my thoughts tempered by both humility and caution. “What I do,“ I ventured, “is to post stories for other aspiring writers to read on a website in hopes of a few ‘likes’, a couple of reposts, and maybe, if I’m lucky, a generous comment or three? It is nothing glamorous.”

The pointed toe of a heeled pump found my boot under the table, resting itself against my foot, whether accident or signal who could say? But the toe stayed there, not pulling away. “So tell me, Huckleberry. What is it you write on this website that other aspiring writers ‘like’, and repost, and comment on?”

My posture literally sagged as my confidence waned. “Well, I’m partial to happy endings.”

The toe moved away from my boot. “So, you write… fairy tales?”

”Well, not exactly. But fiction.”

”Ewww! I abhor fiction.“ She picked up her expensive cocktail, downing it in a swallow, as I had only until recently hoped she might do to me. “Sorry, but I have to go let my dog out.”

”I understand.” It was disappointing, but not entirely unexpected.

”… and to think I was about to let your dog out.” Her nose curled up as she said it as from an unpleasant odor, and she made short, quick strides towards the door, leaving nothing but a shadowy wisp of shea butter on the air to remember her by.

Quicker than I could raise a finger for the waitress to bring the check a mousy brunette slipped herself into my date’s still-warm seat, an ice cold beer in either of her hands. She slid one of the across the table towards me. “I heard it all. Believe me, she wasn’t your type anyways. I, on the other hand, love a happy ending.”

Thankfully for this amateurish writer the night was still young, and another chapter that might be liked, reposted and commented upon waited to be written.

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